General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

The T appears to be thinking to the future of AFC...

https://twitter.com/T4MASS/status/714505580665290755

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Website design/usage:

https://twitter.com/T4MASS/status/714500922425131010

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This is a good stride in a good direction, if they can implement it. Big if there, but I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt until proven wrong.
 
Yeah it's nice, although they still don't support all-door boarding on buses, sadly.

The presentation looks nice. I wonder if it will really be implemented. We were promised a lot of these things last time around.
 
Matthew said:
Yeah it's nice, although they still don't support all-door boarding on buses, sadly.

The presentation looks nice. I wonder if it will really be implemented. We were promised a lot of these things last time around.
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Mathew --remember we've now got at the T an MIT man as CTO whose been given the task to do things that can be done to improve customer service without spending astronomical amounts of money

Modern mobile technology fits that "to a T"
 
Given the dramatic speedup in bus travel with all door boarding due to decreased times at stops seen in San Francisco, this seems like an excellent idea.
 
bigeman312 said:
MBTA eyes money for Natick Center station design



After Natick Center, the only stations on the Worcester Line left to be made compliant are the Newton and Wellesley stops.
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That's cold comfort because "only" the Newtons and Wellesleys constitute 6 consecutive stops, the longest consecutive stretch of non-accessible stops on the whole CR system. With the 3 Newtons being higher-than-average difficulty to modify. They have to do it; the Newtons are a major monkey wrench in the schedule flex not being able to touch both tracks, and the Wellesleys are big ridership. But that's a very expensive half-dozen to tackle.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
That's cold comfort because "only" the Newtons and Wellesleys constitute 6 consecutive stops, the longest consecutive stretch of non-accessible stops on the whole CR system. With the 3 Newtons being higher-than-average difficulty to modify. They have to do it; the Newtons are a major monkey wrench in the schedule flex not being able to touch both tracks, and the Wellesleys are big ridership. But that's a very expensive half-dozen to tackle.
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Very true. I have to imagine that if the Newtons are to be fixed, it's in one, very expensive, track and station rebuild project. Do you see another way?
 
bigeman312 said:
Very true. I have to imagine that if the Newtons are to be fixed, it's in one, very expensive, track and station rebuild project. Do you see another way?
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It's tight, but they can probably do them as island platforms, re-landscape the embankments with new retaining walls, and swing the tracks out wider within the existing footprint. Requires careful placement, but each station site has the necessary width. Islands would be much preferable for consolidating egresses up to street level and keeping passengers safe distance from Pike road spray. Islands would also allow Pike WB to gain proper breakdown lanes next to each station since there'd be less need for a traffic buffer vs. a side platform.

Newtonville still has derelict remnants of its old B&A-era outbound platform. A little embankment shaving and minor retaining wall work should make that one not too difficult. The curve it's on is too slight to cause any issues. West Newton would require moving back the retaining wall a couple feet and re-landscaping the embankment. Both Washington St. rotary overpasses are wide enough as-is since the current egress stairs snake under the bridges, and the tracks are tangent. Auburndale is yuckier because of the curve. May have to be moved a block down so it spans the Auburn St.-Comm Ave. block instead of the Auburn-Woodland Rd. block in order to stay tangent. Then the short, ancient retaining wall would have to be replaced a couple feet back. It would put the small station parking lot much further away from the platforms, and the lot has ADA spaces in it complicating matters. So that will probably be something they have to rectify since eliminating the ADA spaces probably won't fly. That may involve hashing things out with the town and possibly the Comm Ave. Star Market to swap some spaces.

The major expense is going to be constructing switchback ramps and/or elevators from street level and EIS'ing + permitting for the retaining wall work. That's not trivial. Platform construction is all prefab and fixed cost, and the act of swinging the tracks further out is something they can do in one weekend with a machine that literally lifts the intact tracks up and plops them back down on the ground and does them over to re-set them in the ballast. That stuff is trivial, but unfortunately only a small part of the battle. Thankfully Newtonville and West Newton have no abutters, just the embankment framing Washington St. Auburndale, if it has to be relocated a block over, just has the Star plaza and a couple small nondescript medical office buildings as abutters. No big deal for platforms, but the parking relocation will be a slow-moving bureaucratic affair.


It's pricey, but it's mostly boring grunt work. They just have to get it budgeted and moving. The Worcester Line will operate so much better if they could keep trains single-file without having to eat all their margin for dispatch error doing all that 'wrong-rail' outbound running to reach those shitty little side platforms. It matters way more to all the high-ridership stops further out to have this fixed for better schedule resiliency than it does (short-term...at least until Indigo goes on the table) for the meager current ridership at the 3 Newtons.
 
chmeeee said:
MBTA already has a plan to shift trains onto the north track at Auburndale and build an accessible station with direct access from Auburn Street which is almost at the same grade. Don't know how that plays into future plans to operate both tracks.

https://goo.gl/maps/nDe23xZ5Sg82

http://www.wickedlocal.com/article/20130718/News/307189299

I saw a rendering once upon a time but can't find it.
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That's as far as it ever got. Doing it as yet another single-track platform wouldn't work with the frequencies for Gov. Patrick's Indigo plan announced 2 years later, so it's been in limbo ever since. Not worth building at all if it doesn't allow for 2-track access. They'd have to go back almost immediately and do up the second platform with the same expensive egresses the 30% design explicitly tried to avoid, so the supposed cost savings in that design are irrelevant. Back to the drawing board.


They've been delaying basic repairs at these three stations ever since to avoid triggering the ADA compliance clock like has happened with the two Belmont stations. Whatever happens next has to involve some sort of permanent-fix design process.
 
Well that explains why there is no evidence of a rendering or design to be found. I think they sanitized their website to remove all evidence.
 
I don't think this is on any other thread, yet?

Special shout-out to the archBoston forum commenter who's quoted in this column:

A Tale of Two Subway Systems
Gabrielle Gurley, The American Prospect

Washington Metro riders might complain about their subway system, but it could be worse—just look at Boston.

Kvetching about the decline of Metrorail is a popular pastime in Washington, D.C. But area residents may elevate complaining to an art form if Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) officials decide to close off entire lines or sections of the region’s subway system for weeks or months at time—something they said was a real possibility earlier this week.

Yet if Washington riders want to experience how bad commuting can get when a transit agency fails to properly maintain its transportation assets, they can head to the other end of the Northeast Corridor for a preview of coming attractions: Without drastically accelerated repairs, Washington, D.C., will soon have a subway system like Boston’s.

The Metro announcement comes less than two weeks after WMATA General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld ordered an unprecedented one-day shutdown of all Washington Metro subway lines after a fire prompted system-wide safety inspections. But as disruptive as this closure was, it may be just the beginning. On Thursday, Wiedefeld warned that wide-scale safety and maintenance issues may prompt even longer closures in the future, adding that Metro’s piecemeal approach to safety fixes has not done enough.

To be sure, longer interruptions in service are possibilities that some local officials are not eager to embrace. “Shutdowns over an extended period of time will have a significant impact on our residents and businesses who rely heavily on Metro operating regularly,” Prince George’s County, Maryland, Executive Rushern L. Baker III said in a statement ...
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Congrats! You bring up an interesting point with that quote. Do you believe a SGR can be achieved (through unlikely measures like dramatically increased revenue) without major, long-term shutdowns?
 
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